Synners

by Pat Cadigan

Publisher:

Grafton

Copyright:

1991

ISBN:

0-586-21147-0

Format:

Mass market

Pages:

435

Now, this is cyberpunk. I think Cadigan hits every convention I associate
with the genre: a dark future world, blurred lines between reality and
on-line worlds, hacking, street punks, corporate destruction of what's
good about the world, anti-establishment and anti-authority attitudes,
drugs, weird mind trips, and some difficulty figuring out just what the
point is. Synners is a great example of everything I like and
dislike.

On the good side, Cadigan, unlike many cyberpunk authors, has some grasp
over how the technology actually works. Synners is perhaps best
known for the ubiquitous presence of computer viruses in the future world,
and despite missing the evolution of viruses from downloaded data to
self-propagating exploits, the treatment holds up quite well fourteen
years later. This isn't quite as impressive as it might sound, as I was
reading non-fiction books about viruses in 1990 and earlier that were
predicting many of the same things (and happening quite a bit sooner than
they did), but it's still well-done. Even more notably, Cadigan mostly
avoids the standard cyberpunk confusion about where programs run, keeping
them (for the most part) running on actual systems and unable to just
randomly move around a network. There's still a bit too much portability
of executable code for realism, and a few magic programs are exempt from
all the rules and start moving arbitrarily through the network, but
there's at least a plot-driven explanation for some of that.

Cadigan also handles corporations realistically rather than making them
pure evil. They have stupid bureaucracies and want to make money in the
cheapest way possible. They aren't out to destroy the world. Much of the
plot revolves around an independent music video (of a sort) production
group that gets bought out by a media conglomerate that's also working on
a far more efficient and immersive neural interface, a scenario that sets
up plenty of conflict without needing shadowy plots and government
schemes. I found the thought of an advertising-focused corporation with
direct neural access to the minds of consumers realistic and plenty
creepy.

The main downside of this book is that I found it rather hard to follow in
places. The main characters were frequently high on a wide variety of
drugs, sometimes intentionally and sometimes not, and Cadigan spends a lot
of time describing their altered perceptions. This rarely works well for
me, and there's enough of it in Synners that it drags, particularly
combined with the very similar scenes describing the visual experience of
music. They make sense, given the importance of music videos to the plot,
but just weren't very interesting to me.

Synners also suffers from too many viewpoint characters combined
with a lack of a clear indication of who the story is now following after
scene shifts. I'm not sure why authors like to do this; whatever
stylistic gain there is from having it slowly become clear whose viewpoint
is shown seems dwarfed by the irritation of not understanding what's going
on. At least once all the viewpoint characters are shown, Cadigan doesn't
keep adding more, but a dramatis personae would have helped
tremendously in following the first part of the book.

While the book takes a while to get going, things start moving about
halfway through and I did enjoy the plot. The technology gets a bit hard
to believe, but Cadigan's world has amusingly realistic computer problems,
and I could believe in the results of the plot. Some bits of technology
were quite inventive, and I liked the main characters (Sam, Gina, and
Visual Mark were my favorites). I think the best part of the book is the
description of the network crash, cutting back and forth between the bar
and the freeways.

Recommended if you really like cyberpunk and don't mind the attempts at
textual description of weird visuals and intoxication. Otherwise, I found
it worth the effort, but it's slow going in places.